Dayglo

Poetry. Winner of the 2010 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, judged by Terrance Hayes. Sand grains on a bikini bottom, in the spare, gentle lyricism of these poems, become stardust, and also moments in history. DAYGLO never shies from the hurts of reality--a dead bird on a car, an imagined mushroom cloud, a childhood home visited much later and found destroyed--yet it is filled with the light, from sun to "icky cinematic / light," that pervades the mythic landscape of California. Surfers' locutions like "dude" and "no way" are colors of paint in a mirage depicted and embodied.